Can Spotlight show results for disconnected drives

external-diskspotlight

I have several external hard drives which I would like to search for files with Spotlight. They cannot be all connected at the same time.

How can I get Spotlight results for offline external hard drives ?

Best Answer

You can't, Spotlight stores the search index in the root folder of the volume. When the volume is disconnected, you cannot get search results from it.

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Spotlight, infinite indexing, secondary drives, and NAS

There a command line tool which you could use: mdutil. Open Terminal.app application and try the following:

To check the indexing status (on|off) for a volume:

thomas$ mdutil -s /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing enabled.

...and to turn indexing off:

thomas$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
Password:
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing disabled.

...or even better disable spotlight activities:

thomas$ sudo mdutil -d /Volumes/nfs-spotlight/
/Volumes/nfs-spotlight:
    Indexing and searching disabled.

Calling mdutil without any parameter shows all the allowed parameters

It works with my NAS nfs mount but then it's much smaller than 100TB. It's worth a try nevertheless.

Best Answer

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